Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!apple!sun-barr!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: ems%nanotech@princeton.edu Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: First upload Message-ID: Date: 15 Jan 91 22:24:04 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 62 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu At some point it actually will become (almost?) possible to do an upload. What then? There will surely be some sticky problems. A rational person wouldn't take the risk of transferring to a supposedly equivalent brain structure without a very good reason to believe it would be identical, not unless the original person were in danger of immediate biological death. A person in that "do or die" situation might very well take the plunge, and some more-or-less equivalent person would result, but this is unlikely to convince other healthy persons to risk their identities. Something more is needed, or else uploading will always remain an option of last resort. One possibility is to produce a nanotech-style clone, and observe it's every reaction, comparing it to your original reactions. Massive amounts of sensors and difference measurement computations will be needed, but with nanotechnology you'll have them. This of course raises other questions. What do you do with your clone when the experiment is done? Killing it seems immoral, even if you're convinced that your experiment failed (ie the clone is not you, but a new, slightly different person) and especially if you think the experiment succeeded. The clone experiment is not recommended for another reason. You just don't have sufficient control over the real world to produce identical experiences for yourself and your clone in order to compare differences. This suggests that the proper course is to build your clone in simulation, and measure it's reactions in a simulated environment that "exactly" matches your real world environment. An even more massive amount of computation is necessary, compared to the real world clone experiment, but once again nanotechnology should prove capable of providing them. Most experimenters would have fewer qualms about killing their simulated clones when the experiment was ended, but the particular few could simply leave the experiment running as long as the resources were available. Of course even this simulated clone experiment has its own set of knotty problems. If no differences are observed, is it because the simulation is effectively identical, or simply that your sensor network or difference measures or the simulation itself are not fine-grained enough? If differences are observed, will you be able to prove that the differences arose from quantum fluctuations? (To be thorough, you'll have to make the experiment detailed enough that quantum difference are measurable, and then prove the all the differences result from quantum effects. Not too easy.) This leaves aside the question of whether the brain is dependent on quantum fluctuations in its thinking process. Mercifully, that question will have been solved by earlier neural research. If the answer was yes then there is no point in attempting uploading until you've achieved the ability to control events on a quantum level as well. There's also the privacy issue to consider. While you are collecting data for your simulation, you are measuring your every internal response, which is your business, but you will also be recording external events in exacting detail, including all the people you deal with daily. This sort of eavesdropping is likely to cause some problems, and it's not likely to go unnoticed. (Bug detectors will come into regular widespread use not too long after the age of micromachines begins, for privacy reasons.) And there is the data collected on your own internal responses to consider. You would not want your data to fall into the hands of a competitor. (Much more personal than having a thesis stolen :-) Ed Strong ems@princeton.edu